Due to government regulations, healthcare facilities have had to transition from paper-based systems and hybrid paper/electronic systems to fully electronic systems. Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems collect and organize digitally formatted electronic health information and documents for patients in a healthcare facility or organization. EHR systems are designed to provide a paperless environment and better access to documents and data, but oftentimes importing documents and data is difficult and tedious.
Importing and processing hundreds and even thousands of documents on a daily basis into an EHR system is a challenging and inefficient task. Clinical data can be delivered to an EHR system inaccurately and inconsistently which can negatively affect patients, doctors, and staff at a healthcare facility. As an example, documents and data may be matched with an incorrect patient and/or documents and data may be classified incorrectly. These errors can be caused by healthcare employees who are working very quickly, often by necessity, to import documents and data. These problems may cause a healthcare facility and its employees to be less efficient and can be very costly.
Conventional EHR systems do not provide interfaces that allow a user to import physical and/or electronic documents and automatically index the documents by document type, patient, and other relevant data. This makes importing documents and data into an EHR system overly complicated and prone to error.